Book Review

The distinguished University of Tennessee geographer Charles S. Aiken has for more than three decades published important articles about the arc-shaped landmass known as the plantation South. Aiken and other historical geographers of his cohort extended the labors of their great mentor, Merle C. Prunty Jr., whose conceptions and terminology have also been adopted by some historians, including this reviewer. Prunty mapped "occupance" patterns—the spatial distribution of managers' and workers' domiciles, equipment and storage buildings, and animal barns—as the principal means of analyzing and typing plantations over time. Antebellum occupance was centralized, like contemporary industrial factories. Postbellum ("New South") plantations became "fragmented," indicating subdivision into tenant and/or sharecropper leases. By the middle of the twentieth century, as sharecropping and tenancy waned amid massive outmigrations of labor and the mechanical and chemical revolutions in agriculture, many plantations re-centralized, becoming, in Prunty's language, "neoplantations." Aiken has monitored both the development and the growth of neoplantations and the abandonment of farming in subregions of the plantation South since the 1960s. Now comes what would seem Aiken's valedictory, a hefty volume lush with detail and persuasive in argument, that extends the regional narrative into the 1990s.

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